With the dawn of the Ku Klux Klan, the threat of retaliatory violence for advocating for civil rights was real. Exercising the right to vote under the 15 Amendment was dangerous, and access to jobs and education was severely limited. Discrimination was rife in the age of Jim Crow Laws. Life in the post- Reconstruction era South was challenging for Black people. Washington Beliefs And Rivalry with W.E.B. Carver would go on to be a celebrated figure in Black history in his own right, making huge advances in botany and farming technology. It was Washington who hired George Washington Carver to teach agriculture at Tuskegee in 1896.

Washington assumed the role in 1881 at age 25 and would work at The Tuskegee Institute until his death in 1915. It was Chapman who would refer Washington for a role as principal of a new school for African Americans in Tuskegee, Alabama: The Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, today’s Tuskegee University. He went on to study at Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C., but had so impressed Chapman that he was invited to return to Hampton as a teacher in 1879. In 1872, Washington walked the 500 miles to Hampton, where he was an excellent student and received high grades. Chapman had been a leader of Black troops for the Union during the Civil War and was dedicated to improving educational opportunities for African Americans. It was at a second job in a local coalmine where he first heard two fellow workers discuss the Hampton Institute, a school for formerly enslaved people in southeastern Virginia founded in 1868 by Brigadier General Samuel Chapman. In Malden, Washington was only allowed to go to school after working from 4-9 AM each morning in a local salt works before class. Soon after, she married Washington Ferguson, a free Black man. Jane moved her family to Malden, West Virginia. At the close of the Civil War, all the enslaved people owned by James and Elizabeth Burroughs-including 9-year-old Booker, his siblings, and his mother-were freed. His father, a white man, was unknown to Washington. His mother was a cook for the plantation’s owner.

Washington’s Parents and Early Lifeīooker Taliaferro Washington was born on Apin a hut in Franklin County, Virginia.

Up from slavery